Include the salary range.

Make a commitment to show salary ranges for every position at every level of your organization. This is equally as important for C-suite employees as it is for associate level, since associate levels are often new to the workplace and may not feel empowered to negotiate. Including the salary range on a job posting is your organization’s evidence of a commitment to transparency, trust, and equity. When a job posting doesn’t include a salary range, it raises many red flags for prospective employees and they may be discouraged from applying. By sharing a salary range, you’re inspiring trust in your future employees and recognizing that transparency with employees (future--and current ones who may read this as well) improves motivation, loyalty, and performance.

At the same time, you’re acknowledging the nuanced process that is connecting job seekers with employment and helping people to find a healthy, appropriate match. Of course, including a salary range helps facilitate fair and equitable negotiations between employers and job seekers, especially for women and people of historically underrepresented communities such as Black, Indigenous, People of Color, Asian Americans, Latinx, LGBTQ+ people, disabled people, and other marginalized groups that have faced discrimination. It also allows candidates to self-select and creates a more exacting candidate pool - one that is likely to produce a candidate who says yes to a first offer. Today, we see a change across the United States and Canada toward pay transparency, honoring that salary ranges must be visible on job postings and advertisements in 21 states and 21 localities and growing. And don’t forget, New York City based organizations, May 15 is quickly approaching! May 15 is the date on which the NYC pay transparency law goes into effect, requiring all employers with four or more employees to post salaries for all jobs. That includes all of our national Jewish organizations based in New York as well. We don’t yet know that this guarantees equity for all, but we know that it’s a helpful start in the right direction.

As an added bonus, including the salary range on a job posting, guarantees both employers’ and prospective employees’ time is used most efficiently by streamlining hiring and filtering out candidates who are not a match. Employers, you deserve an effective process. Posting a salary range at this stage of your hiring process builds in a mechanism for screening candidates who are not the right salary match, and enables you to save effort and energy at the same time. Clarity helps, and the messages that this sends about your process and about your values is an invitation to prospective employees to consider joining your organization.

Looking for resources, language and more? Visit our Salary Range Transparency Toolkit. And if we don’t yet have what you need, drop us a line. We’re in the process of developing a new suite of tools and resources, and we’d love to hear what will make your work easier and more equitable.